


The Pretender

by FayeOfTheForest



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-11-14 17:01:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18056531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FayeOfTheForest/pseuds/FayeOfTheForest
Summary: What if Hans made a different decision in that fateful moment when Anna comes to him?





	The Pretender

**Part 1:**  
  
Hans was good at pretending - he always had been. In his home, with his father and his brothers, if he had not early learned how to control his expressions and think on his feet he would have been ground up and turned into a pitiful shell of a human being long before he ever sat foot in Arendelle.  
He only has a few seconds to think when Anna comes to him, her hair befuddlingly streaked with white and her eyes wet, and tells him she’s dying at the hand of her sister. That only an act of true love can save her. That he needs to kiss her back to health.  
In that moment his mind goes into a whirlwind of repressed emotion and cold calculation, because this is very bad. Anna was supposed to be his key to freedom, his dainty little clueless wife, so easily manipulated, bringing him from thirteenth in line to the crown of the Southern Isles to third in line to the crown of Arendelle. And with a bit a bit of luck and a handful of cunning, who knew what could have happened from there?  
But if she died now before they were married he was back to square one. All of that sweet talk and romanticism, all of the information he had collected, all of the schmoozing with the other ambassadors, all the inane little managerial responsibilities he had helped fulfil as the queen and her little sister ran off to have their emotional breakdown - it would all have been for naught.  
Because Hans was a nobody, a thirteenth son from some far away kingdom with no more claim to Arendelle than the town butcher. Even if he had the support of the other foreign dignitaries he would never have the support of the people of the land. If not Elsa or Anna they would undoubtedly send for some distantly related nobleman or choose one amongst their own nobility to be their chief in command. Hans thought he already knew the most likely candidate - The lord Bjørn Lukassøn was a nobleman who had been close to the girls’ king father, he who had been the connection point between the princesses and the outside world during their self imposed isolation and served as regent and mentor when Elsa was yet too young and ignorant of the ways of ruling. Although stiff and humourless he was an dutiful man, a man people knew and trusted, with a wife and children and an extended family who was highly active in Arendelle’s high society. He was the one they would want, Hans was sure.  
Perhaps if he somehow managed to kill Bjørn he could create enough chaos to be able to take the throne by brute force, but he hadn’t the men for it to be a lucrative bet.  
Or perhaps he could persuade Bjørn to let him stay on after Anna’s death, playing the long con and rising through the rungs.  
Or he could attempt to woo Elsa as he had done Anna - fly to her side after her sister’s death and offer his shoulder and his heart. What a risky thing that would be, trying to seduce and tame an  queen.  
But what would be best for him was if Anna would live and he could marry her. Though Hans knew he couldn’t save her with his kiss. He did not love her. Nor did he hate or dislike her. He thought she was weak and silly and too sweet for the world. She reminded  him in some ways of the sick kitten he had found in the king’s forest once - the one he’d nursed back to health and adored playing with until Jon (the third in line) had wrung it’s neck in front of him to make him cry.     
If he kissed her now she would know that he was not her storybook love, but if he did not she would assume as much. Either way Anna would hardly feel like marrying him knowing he had lied to her.  
Although...  
Hans kissed her with all he had, chaste and sweet at first before his hand came around her neck and pulled her into him. As she gasped he let his tongue seek hers and tentatively she started to kiss back, to let her tongue meet his. It was tender and wet and intense to the point of becoming bruising. It was an amalgamation of all the kisses he had collected whenever none of his more entitled brothers were around to steal them.  
When they finally parted Anna was breathing heavily, hair mussed, face pink and pupils enormous. She stared into his eyes and he stared back, unflinching. His face mirrored hers - full of wide eyed wonderment.  
But, as he pulled a hand through her hair ever so gently and drew both their gazes to it, he let his face fall into a grimace of despair. “It didn’t work” he near sobbed as the white strands fell through his fingers.  
Anna stared at her still white hairs in open mouthed shock and drew in a shuddering breath, shivering all over. “I don’t understand”  
“I don’t either” Hans said, adopting a false breathy pant.  
“You said you loved me! You asked me to marry you!” Anna accused in a voice that would have been a shout if it wasn’t so drained of energy.  
“I still do!” Hans took her hands in his and laced their fingers. “Anna, I don’t know why it didn’t work, because I adore you and I care about you. I love so many things about you - how  sweet you are, your kind heart, your adventurous spirit, your bright courage. Your freckles and your big green eyes and your cute braids. I do want to marry you! I want to kiss you and touch you and wake up next to you. I want to make children with you”  
Anna blushed deeply even as she gazed at him with distrust. “Then why didn’t it work?”  
“I don’t know” Hans repeated. “Perhaps what the gods mean by ‘true love’ is something different from what we think it is. Perhaps it’s just too early for that. My mother once told me that deep love isn’t something that just appears one moment. It’s something that is built a little bit every day, that comes from sharing your lives - your joys and losses and responsibilities with one another. Perhaps we’re too new for that, but believe me Anna, I am in love with you and I want to be able to have that with you!”  
Here Hans contracted the fine musclature of his face and called forth the worst of his memories (a dead cat, bruises on mother’s arms, father’s ugly words echoed in bis brothers’ voices) and felt tears pressing forward.  
“I want you to live, Anna!” he told her, and then she had fallen into his arms with a sob.  
“But if not you, who in the world can save me?”  
  


***

  
In the end Anna was saved by her own love. Elsa escaped the dungeon and attempted to run away once again, emoting a blizzard into being, but somehow Anna caught up with her and ice howled around them as they spoke. But when one of the pursuing soldiers found their way through to the storm’s eye what he thought he saw was an ice witch attempting to murder a defenceless girl. And so he took his swing.  
Anna shattered his sword with her own body - and in the same move she melted her own heart and her sister’s and the land of Arendelle itself.  
Hans knew all this through Anna, but he wasn’t there himself - he told Anna later that he got lost in the blizzard, damn his poor sense of direction, but really he never truly attempted to reach them at all and was intentionally walking in circles among the ships frozen in the water. He got soaked just like everybody else when Elsa magicked away the ice, but overall nobody suffered anything more dire than a cold from the swim back to shore.  
Even the man who took the swing at the queen survived to tell the tale, though he got shoved onto a homebound ship at the first opportunity.  
It all worked out - Elsa was crowned, Anna was saved, the sisters were reunited, Arendelle came alive again and, within the year, Hans had wed his bride.  
  


***

  
It was the kiss that did it more than anything else, Hans suspected. Sure, Anna thought him handsome and honourable and romantic, and she liked him, but it was mostly the kiss. She hungered for it - to be kissed and touched and wanted, and after that first kiss she just couldn’t get enough.  
He stays, after it is all over, tells his father’s navy man to shove it when he attempts to persuade him his king wants him to follow the plan and come home. It feels good to say it and it helps that Anna finds it sweet, but the truth is he knows his father could probably not care at all except to call him an impudent brat.  
After that he’s given a fine room in the castle and things to do in Arendelle. Kristoff was also there and much for the same reasons; Anna liked him. Luckily for Hans it doesn’t seem Anna was much aware of her attraction to him though, and Kristoff was far too awkward and bumbling to make a move. Particularly since he didn’t think he had a chance going up against the princely Hans.  
They were dating, Anna and him - going on hikes, rides, picnics and trips to market. Together they built snow men, drank countless cups of tea and cocoa, ran through the fields, jumped in the hay, and talked about everything and anything under the sky.  
It wasn’t difficult - he’s made a point of knowing what Anna likes and it’s not too hard for a studious man like him to find things to speak of and new adjectives to use as compliments.  
It surprises him how little he minds it all. To him it all seemed to be silly and meaningless things, activities he would never have allowed himself to take part in in the Southern Isles. There he had spent his time split between hiding away in the library with his books, scheeming and sniping at or fighting with his brothers. He could hardly remember a time when he had done so much just for the fun of doing it.  
Or, of course, it wasn’t just for the fun of it - not for him. For Hans it was about seduction, but still, it was odd how he found himself enjoying such simple things as the heavy scent of the forest after a rain fall, the flimmer of the Aurora above or even the simple discussions over which ribbon suited Anna more.         
Even the kisses were enjoyable, though he did not feel the spark of electricity that made Anna so wide eyed and weak in the knees. And there were so many kisses. Whenever they were alone Anna would eventually come to him, never initiating contact herself, but always coming too close and blushing to much for it to be anything but an invitation.  
Sometimes there would be more too. A tight embrace, a brush of teeth against Anna’s throat or ear lobe, a hand cupping her breasts as she held on to his shoulders for dear life.  
One memorable evening she had come to him in the conference room where he had stood bent over some papers, studying tax reports and expenditures on a mission from Elsa. Anna had sat on the table, nearly on top of his work and told him she missed him.  
“I haven’t seen you since breakfast” she accused, pouting sweetly, and then they were kissing and he was between her legs and her back against the table top, scattering papers as they necked like the teens they were. But at some point it became something more than that, her legs coming up to bracket his hips, their pelvises dangerously close and Anna started to pull her skirts up.  
He had taken her wrists in his, stopping her short. “Anna, we shouldn’t” he told her reluctantly and watched as her face contracted with the sting of rejection, her lip trembling.  
“Oh, Anna” he sighed and brushed his fingers through her hair. “It’s just better if we wait till after we are married. If we start something now I don’t know whether I’ll have the will to stop and what then if I got you with child out of wedlock? I don’t want that for our baby, or for you”    
Anna had looked embarrassed as she hopped off the table and straightened her clothing, but she had nodded “You’re right. Of course you are”  
It wasn’t many weeks later when Anna started to wonder aloud whether a summer wedding or a spring wedding would be better and he felt his lips pull up into a genuine smile as he told her “Spring. Definitely spring”.  
Seducing Anna hadn’t been difficult at all - quite the contrary.  
  


***

  
It’s a lovely ceremony - flowers everywhere, lovely food, people smiling and laughing a lot. Anna looks more beautiful than ever in the lacy white gown she inherited from her mother and her eyes asparkle with happiness.  
Hans was on edge though. Lars and his mother were the only ones of his family who had come, as he had predicted when Anna asked who they should send invitations to.  
“My dear father and mother are the only ones we have to send one to, but he won’t come. He never leaves the isles” he had told her, adding and he would think coming below him in the privacy of his own mind. “Mother will come. And perhaps some of my brothers”  
She had looked so saddened and full of pity when he said that, but Hans had dearly wished that none of them, not even his mother, would come at all.  
It wasn’t that he did not wish to see her - he did sometimes long for her, the only person who had ever truly cared for him, but there was just too much risk resting on her good behaviour. That she wouldn’t get drunk and take snipes at his father or start talking about his childhood.  
And with Lars there it set him even more on edge. Because more than anybody he knew Hans. He was the only brother he had who did not loathe him or ignore him, but actually spent time with him. He was sixth in line, not old enough to be considering fratricide to win the crown and not young enough to rest his entire notion of self on being better than his younger brothers. Lars was big, strong and skilled enough with the sword for his father to respect him, but he was also smart enough to never win a sparring match against his elder brothers. Like Hans, he enjoyed books about tactic and history and, like Hans, he had a tendency to scheeme and plot and manipulate.  
Behind himself, Hans considered Lars to be the most intelligent member of his entire family. And the only one who could see through his false faces effortlessly.  
“You’ve done well for yourself, little brother” Lars whispered in his ear as he hugged him in congratulations. “Pretty castle, pretty country, prettier wife. I’m proud. But are you going to be able to put a baby in her belly, I wonder?” he challenged, grinning wickedly at his brother’s polite, frozen face caught as a frame around his sneering eyes.  
He said naught else problematic that day, if you did not consider his knowing smiles and looks, but in the night Hans remembered it and uses it to fuel himself. He is like a competing knight at a tourney as he licks Anna’s breasts, toys with her nipples, slides his slender fingers into her. Every time she sighs or moans or gasps his name he gets closer to the trophy. As he presses into her tight heat it feels like a choreographed move in a dance he is performing on stage for the first time. As she contracts with a shout around him and he allows himself to spill into her he he hears his brother’s sardonic clapping in the back of his mind.  
When they leave a few days later, his mother with tears in her eyes and Lars with a quiet “It will be boring without you, littlest brother”, Hans feels like he could sleep a week through.  
  


***

  
Anna tells him she’s pregnant two months later, half excited to the point of jumping up and down at the idea of having a little one to cuddle and coddle, half terrified of the thought of actually having to grow and to give birth to it.  
Hans’ awe felt real as he touched her still flat belly, and it only grew as it did. He was shaken, because in the company of the growing child his mask felt comfortable as it never had before.  
She squeezed his hand so tight he couldn’t feel it any more as she laboured, and he kept the encouragements going as she panted and howled and whimpered, You can do this, Ana. Ana, you’ve got this. One more push, just one more. Breathe with me. You’re doing so well!  
When he gently resettles the child in his own arms later as Anna’s eyelids grow heavy with exhaustion he marvels at how light he is, how much he looks like himself. His throat tightens almost painfully as he watches those green eyes peer up at him.  
All along it was this it was all for, to ensure his legacy, to create a place for them, but now that he is there he feels so out of his depth.  
  


***

  
Agdar, they agree - to honor Anna’s father. Quickly he grows, and there is so much emotion now that Hans struggles to trust. He’s so afraid for him and he’s never been so desperate to protect another creature before. He remembers Silk, with it’s soft fur and it’s neck twisted all wrong.  
They argue over it - his and Anna’s first fights. She is already pregnant again, their second born conceived in the fumes of love surrounding the birth of the first.  
She looks fierce as she stands there, hands on her hips, her belly ballooning under her dress and a sneer on her face Hans has never seen before.  
“You do not hit my child!” she hisses at him. “You will not!”  
“He was reaching for the flame, Anna -”  
“He is a baby - babies are stupid, Hans. It doesn’t mean you should hit them! Promise me you’ll never do it again. Promise me!”  
Hans promises. But he wonders how his children will ever learn to be strong if everything around them is so soft. And he is slightly horrified because he had loathed his father for his brutishness ever since he had realized his love was unreachable, but now he finds the man’s world view printed inside his own skull.  
If nothing else, his father and brothers had let him know the truth. That the world was ugly and cruel and cared nothing for silly notions of fairness or decency.    
That all that truly mattered was power.  
  


***

  
This birth thankfully goes much more easily than their firstborn’s and Anna’s hopes for a little girl to finish the pair is proven futile when little Øystein pops out. Hans had expected as much - over twenty five years his mother had given his father thirteen boys, but only five girls. It was probably for the best, for as callous as king Harren treated his sons, he cared even less for the girls he married off as soon as they started to bleed.  
In the end she didn’t seem to mind at all as the midwife handed her the tiny squalling bundle, big eyed wonder in her eyes as she muttered sweet nonsense at his beautiful little face, and Hans squashed a relieved sigh. Boys were easier. You didn’t have to worry quite as much about them.    
This time it’s different than the last, instead of being two people sharing responsibility for one baby, working in tandem to give each other room to breathe and bathe and sleep, they alternate between the two children. Agdar is still so small that, though he is starting to understand some things, he can’t understand why the new baby is stealing so much of his mother’s attention.  
Sometimes Hans can see the child frowning and fussing at his brother as Anna nurses the baby, jealously wondering why he still gets to drink her milk when Agdar doesn’t. Hans shushes him when this happens, holds him closer to his chest and whispers into his ear. It’s always the same words.  
“That is your little brother, Agdar. Øystein is your little brother. You need to take care of him, Agdar. Take care of your little brother”  
 

***

  
It’s exhausting, and they never really have time to spend alone together, always ending up sleeping whenever they actually take Elsa and Kristoff up on their offers to babysit. Of course there are the servants, but leaving their children to them over a prolonged time doesn’t sit right with either of them. Their life is ruled by routine - mealtime, playtime, storytime, bedtime. Rinse, wash, repeat.  
Hans doesn’t mind much, he’s over having existential crises’ over whether men should change diapers or not. He’s done fretting over how much he enjoys cuddling his children, smelling their skin and hearing their wheezy little laughs when he makes undignified faces at them.  
For Anna, who has to wake with the fretful sleeper Øystein to nurse him, it’s worse, and though she adores her little ones more than life itself, Hans can tell she longs to have a reprieve from their presence.  
It doesn’t surprise him when she announces, just as they are weaning Øystein off the mother’s milk, that she’s going with Kristoff to visit his parents in the mountains.  
And when she comes home to him a week later, pacing anxiously around the room, weeping as she shakily tells him what happened, that doesn’t truly surprise him either.  
  


***

  
Kristoff finds him standing on the battlements, staring into the twilit darkness, his arms wrapped around himself to protect his skin from the frosty winds of approaching winter. He hadn’t thought to put on a coat before he walked out of his and Anna’s quarters.  
“Anna thought you’d gone to kill me” Kristoff told him as he awkwardly approached, stopping a few feet away.  
Hans huffed, amused despite himself. “Would have been a bit over-dramatic. And you would probably win that fight. There’s a reason why you never see me sparring in the courtyard”  
“She’s sorry, you know”  
“I know”  
“She didn’t mean for it to happen. Neither of us - “  
Hans interrupts him - “Are you going to try and get her to leave me for you?” he asks.  
Kristoff seems stumped for a moment, then pouts sadly, puppylike. “I don’t think that’s going to happen. She told me she thinks it was a mistake. That we’re better as friends”  
Hans sighs. “She’s always been attracted to you, you know. From the moment you met, probably. But you’re an ice cutter and you’ve never known how to talk to women” he meets Kristoff’s wide eyes with his cool ones. “She’s not going to leave me. I asked her to promise me and she did. Neither of us want that for the children”  
He turns to leave, but Kristoff stops him with a hand on his arm, “Am I banished?” he asks him.  
Hans shrugs him off, “Only Elsa can banish you. And I don’t think she would. Not when she knows Anna is the one who made a move on you”.  
“How did you - did she tell you?”  
Hans hides a smile, “No. But I know her and I know you. It couldn’t have been any other way”  
  


***

  
When he returns Anna is sitting on the edge of their bed, twisting her hands in her lap. She darts up the moment he steps in the door.  
They share a long look and she takes in how undisturbed his appearance is, the fine shirt still tucked and folded nicely. “You didn’t hit him” she exhales relieved.  
“No. We just had a chat”  
“Hans, it’s not going to happen again. I swear it!” she repeats, taking his hands. “I love you. You’re my husband and I am entirely yours, from now until the end of my days” Anna quotes their vows.  
Hans laces his fingers in hers, “I know honey, I love you too” - and it feels less false than it did in the beginning. She’s the mother of his children, so of course he loves her. But he still wasn’t angry at her transgression. He hadn’t asked her to promise to never be with Kristoff again because he honestly didn’t know whether he cared about that. Only about the marriage. And the children.  
“Come on, then. We should go relieve Elsa of the boys, they have been missing you horribly, you know”  
  


***

  
Kristoff isn’t banished, but Anna does ask him to stay away for a few weeks. She probably thought the distance would help cool their desire, but it doesn’t work. Four weeks gone by and nothing changes.  
Anna tells him naught of this, but Hans has keen eyes. He can see her longing gazes into the distance, her tense shoulders, her tortured frowns and sighs.  
One night she wakes him up in the middle of the night, a hand on his cock, whispering in his ear, and she slides onto him and fucks herself on him till her thighs start shaking and he has to roll on top of her.  
That repeats itself a few times and Hans doesn’t know whether it’s a way to let out her repressed desire or whether it’s out of guilt, but it’s pleasant either way.    
When Kristoff returns, looking miserable but hopeful, she tries to keep a cautious distance to him, but her resolve is soon dissipated. He’s her best friend and it’s impossible for her to keep away.  
So the two of them resolve to just be friends and never let themselves slip again, but of course Hans knows they will eventually fail.  
They have too much chemistry to be able to keep from falling into each other. They’re so similar in the ways that matter and just different enough in the ways that don’t. Kristoff might be coarse and rough around the edges where Anna, for all her mischief, is soft and elegant as spun silk, but his calloused hands are more attractive to Anna than Hans’ slender, clean ones, his hight and strength makes her breathless, his goofy humour matches hers perfectly.  
He’s a gentle giant and she’s a gentle fey.  
It would have been them, if not for Hans.

  
***

  
“Are you all right?” - It’s a question that surprises him coming from her, because though he knows Elsa has been told all of what has happened between her and Kristoff, and likely bore the brunt of Anna’s angst and tears those last weeks, he did not ever expect her to attempt to talk about it with him.  
He looks up from where Agdar is clumsily galloping his little wooden horse over his brother’s belly and meets her gaze questioningly.  
“Anna told me about her transgression” she said as a way of explanation, although it did little to clarify why she would enquire such a thing of him.  
“Yes, I am quite all right” he told her, “Though it’s been... tough. Probably more so for Anna than me, I think”  
Elsa hummed watching him considerately. “You are being remarkably relaxed about this, but then perhaps Anna isn’t the only one to be having some trouble”  
Her pause went unanswered and she smiled. “You got married very young. Young and in love. It’s no wonder that you had to fall back to the ground one day”  
She’s half right, of course. Anna’s attraction to Kristoff wouldn’t have been a problem if she hadn’t been falling out of love with Hans then, as all the mundane little things ruined the magic of him. As his mask cracked.  
“She loves you, my sister, but I fear...”  
“She’s going to do it again” Hans completed.  
Elsa nodded. “Anna told me, a few years passed, of the time Kristoff took her to the pebble trolls to see if they could cure her - cure what I did” She looked away a moment, pain in her eyes. “And they had acted so strange, Anna told me - they had been trying to get her to marry Kristoff right there and then. They thought he was her true love”  
Anna had told him the same story, and laughed as she did. “Well, the trolls do love Kristoff a great deal”  
She laughed. “Yes, according to them she married the wrong man” And according to you too, I bet, Hans soundlessly commented.  
Hans got up to lay another log onto the sputtering fire, grateful not to have to look into her knowing eyes. “To be honest, I don’t really believe in true loves. I think love is something you build through time” he told her.    
“Yes, love is a complex thing. Anna loves you, and she loves the children, and me, and she loves Kristoff. All in different ways”  
He sighed. “Elsa, what exactly is it you wish to tell me?”  
She hummed, considering her words carefully before she spoke. “I know my sister feels horrible about this, about betraying you and about wanting to do it again. Anna is torturing herself over being in love with Kristoff because she believes it hurts you, but to my eyes you don’t actually seem to care that much”  
  


***

  
He approaches Anna the same night, seats himself in one of the lounge chairs and waits for her to get done washing up for bed. When she finally comes she looks at him with wide eyed trepidation, as though she is expecting some kind of scolding.  
She takes the chair beside his without a word.  
“Anna” he starts, “I think maybe our relationship, our romantic relationship isn’t really working in the way we would have wished”  
“Hans” - Anna looks as if she’s about to tear up and he expects there’s another apology coming soon.  
He holds up a prim hand, “Please, Anna. Let me finish. It’s not working as we’d hoped and I think that we might want to - to open up the possibility of involvement with people outside our marriage”  
Anna blinks, dumbstruck for a moment, and then shakily asks “You wish to see other women?”  
“No. Well, perhaps eventually-”  
“Is there somebody else?” she interrupts him rudely and she actually sounds jealous, which makes Hans smile.  
“No, there’s no other woman” he tells her. “But when you told me - about you and Kristoff, I thought I would feel angry, but I didn’t. The thought of you two together - I didn’t mind it so long as I knew what we have together was left intact”  
She looked at him as though he was speaking an alien language, like she couldn’t understand him at all. And she probably couldn’t really. For all Anna’s goodness she was a possessive woman - what was hers was hers.  
“Elsa told me she thinks we have fallen out of love with each other and perhaps that is true because - though I know I love you as fiercely as ever, I would not mind it if you wished to lie with Kristoff again. Your body being mine is not the most important thing to me”  
At first she tells him that it’s preposterous, accuses him of not loving her, tells him this is just a tiny little issue she has to get past. But eventually, after a night and a day to think about it she sees past the sting of rejection she feels and sees that Hans has just given her free reign to do what she wants.  
Hans doesn’t know when or what exactly happens, but he assumes it’s quite momentous, because when he finally hears the creak of their bedroom door opening that night and the patter of her feet as she pads across the floor it’s sunrise and she looks absolutely exhausted and absolutely content.  
“Thank you” she whispers into his ear as she crawls in behind him.  
He yawns. “Just keep it out of our bed and away from our kids”  
  


***

  
The ice cutter’s reaction to it all was really inconsequential, because of all of them he was the one with least choice in this matter. He loved Anna, but she had promised to stay with Hans and despite her previous slip she was a woman of her word.  
So this was the best Kristoff could hope for really, and he seemed grateful to Hans for it even as he thought it strange and likely judged him for it privately.  
He was obviously uncomfortable with it, because suddenly their relations become more awkward even than before Anna wed him, when they loathed each other. Eventually though, just as then, they learn to talk to each other again, be friends and to work together whenever called for.  
Anna still cuddled up beside Hans most nights, still kisses him hello and goodbye and good morning, still sometimes sit in his lap or flirts or insist he make love to her. She gets to have her cake and eat it too, and she’s honest about it. And so does Hans, if in a different way.  
Only Kristoff is left without cake. 

  
***

  
  
When Anna’s breasts grow heavy and sore once again she tells Hans it’s probably not Kristoff’s - she hasn’t ever let him spill inside her, but nine months later the baby is blue eyed and has sparse golden hairs. Like father, Anna says, but none of them are really sure. She is also a she. Anna gets her little Idunn.  
Hans doesn’t expect to love her or even like her, but she is a very, very tiny baby who smells as good as any other baby and babbles adorably to herself. When Anna presents her to her brothers and they cautiously let a big eyed Agdar who is by now a bit over three hold her, Hans knows he is done for.  
The two parents agree that Idunn is probably going to grow up to be an absolutely gorgeous menace.  
Kristoff is always watching her - happily when he gets to be near, longingly when he doesn’t. Kristoff’s gaze on them feels especially heavy when Hans is the one holding her and playing with her, a vulnerable, almost puzzled look on his face.  
  
  
***  
  
  
It’s not long after she’s born that Kristoff’s extended troll family comes to visit him in Arendelle. Kristoff claims they’re there to see the city and the castle, but it was obvious they were there for Idunn.  
All of Kristoff’s adoptive brothers and sisters, near tearing down the castle with their sheer enthusiasm. Crowding around Anna as she holds the little girl and cooing and babbling at her. All wanting to touch her.  
However polite they mean for their speech to be Hans can feel their dislike for him in the looks and whispers they share amongst themselves,  so he keeps a distance to the little creatures. And he’s happy to - just looking at the trolls, with their boundless energy and strange nonsensical bodies and existence makes his brain hurt with suppressed incredulity.  
Thankfully they don’t stay all that long, for as delighted as Agdar and Øystein are at the odd creatures and their tomfoolery, the rest of the people in the castle grew tired of them the same day they came. Even Anna tells him, “Gods, I thought they would never leave!”  
But Kristoff, however much he frowns and apologises for their erratic behaviour, looks sad to see them go. But there is something else in his eyes as well, after they leave. As Hans catches the ice cutter’s gaze fixed on him he sees something strangely speculative in those blue orbs .  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, people. Hope you liked it!  
> Part 2 will hopefully not be too long in the making, but I will promise nothing. Procrastination seems destined to be my curse forever.


End file.
